Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered.
All four of these posters have pages on both Facebook and Instagram with mirrored content and all four have post histories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have the blue verified check marks and a label indicating that they’re an AI “managed by Meta.” Users can block them on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message them across all of Meta’s platforms, including WhatsApp.
https://gizmodo.com/metas-ai-profiles-are-already-polluting-instagram-and-facebook-with-slop-2000545433Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
He was already a weirdo before the money, well adjusted people don't create face match or whatever he called it
Bonus: Elon "fuck yourself in the face" Musk pretending to be shocked.
I can't imagine anyone getting me to delete my Twitter account faster than Elon Musk did
I mean, he had a point, particularly at the time.
Question: SNS stands for social network services, but if this message predates Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, what it was? MySpace or msn Messenger?
I think he meant SSN.
He meant just sn.
Facebook at that time was not collecting social security numbers (nor are they currently, I don't believe.
I agree he's a weirdo, but this isn't engagement per se, it's to make money. If someone seems legit and is saying how awesome a product is, people will buy stuff. Meta will create a persona for businesses for a price. Meta wouldn't let people go rogue and create their own, they want to sell the service.
Jon Stewart's Dinner with Obama, Cuban, and Bezos.
There's a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It's not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don't even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.
I've been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who've made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don't think it's much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It's their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.
One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It's a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.
I don't think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they're up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.
I don't like Zuck, but he did not misunderstand humans. He's just 2 steps ahead of you. Kids go on https://c.ai right now and playfully chat with AI posing as various pop culture characters or professions. While this generation grows up, Zuck will have a portfolio of made up characters ready and waiting for them on FB, where the humans can live their life without ever befriending another real human and sharing everything with Meta, to be monetized.
you don't have to understand people to make this move. just market trends
Metaverse tells me that he doesn't understand kids or market trends.
Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of "youth these days"?
The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).
The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it's same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that's not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.
Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck's horror show.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It's still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that's quite easily adjustable.
One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don't need fine literature, just a "good enough" quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.
Tobacco company selling cigarettes to kids. More at 11.
People don't seem to realize that powerful people are all the same as us; they eat, they poop, they get dressed, they sleep.
What they have is widespread recognition and resources, and enough people that listen to them and care about what they do.
Zuckerburg or Putin or Trump or anyone else in power cannot physically implement everything they want done. It takes lackeys and yes men to carry out their wishes. Sure would be nice if everyone would just be decent and quit listening to them.
deyt eat da poopoo?
That’s what the world was missing, NPCs.
I just wish they were interesting NPCs.
Hey, take what you can get.
I'll take the guy that says "Welcome to Corneria". He may not have much to say, but he sounds more sincere at least.
We're only gonna get variations of the "Welcome to Revachol" guy, unfortunately
I like swords.
^8-bit^ ^theater^ ^joke,^ ^sorry^
I was, of course, refering to the actual Final Fantasy NPC.
^not^ ^really,^ ^that^ ^was^ ^100%^ ^8-bit^ ^theater^ ^too^
No kidding. What we get I’d Woman Laughing Alone With Word Salad
The only way to get everyone to get along is to create a new, even lower underclass of citizen for the humans to all feel smug about. This is that.
This started as a joke but the more I think about it the more afraid I am that I'm right.
Fucking toasters
Boomer Eight did nothing wrong! (Maybe I can’t remember)
Best thing you can do is not use any Meta products. What a shit company
Replace "meta" will "all of big tech and surveillance capitalism" and I agree.
Instructions unclear, ended up in a cabin alone in the woods.
This sounds like a caricature.
It screams white person lying about their identity to justify some whackadoo comment. "I can say this racist/homophobic thing bc I'm a black queer momma of 2. If you can't handle me, you're bigoted".
... sure they are ...
As a black queer mom....
... you want to tell me how awesome and life-changing Useless Product NX900 is?
Well shucks, please send me your black queer mom affiliate link so I can get in on this.
Edit: what a minute, this looks like a hetero white guy affiliate link. Dang it, tricked me again.
“As a Balck queer mom, I trust Republicans!”
Sounds like a honeypot or something. Idk what horrifying use it might have
Wow that’s horrifying. Hilarious and horrifying.
Way to try to force a stereotype there Meta.
Absolutely disgusting whatever the fuck this platform is trying to do with this AI nonsense
This all really feels like a desperate attempt to save their dying social networks, just filling their sites with garbage to make it look like they're not declining
It's great to see them scramble to do anything of monetary value with their platforms. It only seems to be good for fake news and spreading hate (and remembering birthdays).
I also use them to advertise Lemmy
They're doing it to sell to companies to sell positive opinions and politics from "real" people.
Idk, but I don't really see that Instagram is dying.
Twitter. Reddit.
This is getting really fucking creepy. I suppose next they're going to start following and sending private messages because anything is worth it for our precious "engagement".
I just want to skip from here to getting murdered by a Megan Fox sexbot maid
Don't Date Robots!
This is brilliantly dystopian They can create hyper-specific profiles to target specific eyeballs and feed ads from the profile itself. They no longer have to rely on users posting things others would react to. They can just write what they know will generate reactions.
All the ones I’ve seen so far are minorities. This is fucking blackface.
I can't wait for the AI to reach this level of peak comedy
So brave, as a white man, to speak out as a black woman.
It is so much worse. Humanfacing
This is some legit dystopian shit right here. I almost wish I hadn’t abandoned these platforms years ago, so that I could take this opportunity to do it. I hope that more people wake up to the insidious nature of this company and these services.
Join once. Leave seven hundred and twelvety times.
It feels like Zuckerberg is out of ideas and just chases the trends to stay relevant. He was all in on the “metaverse” until he wasn’t because the concept disappeared. Now, he’s all in on AI because everyone else is. Even the quest, before it became the face of the metaverse, was him chasing another big idea from someone else.
He and the company haven’t had original ideas in a very long time. Even the smaller ones, like Stories and Reels, are just ideas copied from someone else.
The Facebook wasn’t even his idea. The Winklevoss Bros came up with it and he was the programmer they got to code it, and subsequently stole it from them.
I still don't understand why they're doing it. They can't possibly think this will be good long-term, can they?
And what's with the article ending on a note of trying to make it sound bad that reviving nuclear power is a negative thing? If that's the result of AI slop, then I'd call it a net positive.
Dead internet theory is becoming true.
Bots talking to bots will be 90% of the internet.
A new odd language will develop that us meatbags won't understand.
On god no cap frfr
In around 2005 or so I went back to look at a Usenet newsgroup which had been a major part of my online life in the 1990s. All the people had gone, but the spambots were still there and the entire group was just bot spam posted at nobody and read by no one. The bots were even replying to one another's threads. A forum where multiple IRL human friendships had been forged over the years was nothing more than grifting robots spamming at each other.
It's fully 20 years later and the same shit is going down with a new coat of paint.
I really miss the BBS forums.
I made a load of friends on those.
When I quit reddit, it occurred to me that after 10 years, I hadn't made a single friend there.
Now many of these remaining BBS forums have a constant battle against bots.
I'd suggest they know growth of the platforms is waning, if not going backwards, but if they create a heap of bots and call them "active users" then the share price won't go down. That's the only reason I can think of.
That was my first thought too. It seems like that would be an easy way to get sued by advertisers though. You can't sell stuff to bots.
If I had to make business sense of this, it might be a pilot for eventual functions like a "sentiment injection" tool to really sway public opinion. With enough halfway believable accounts, not only does the site look more active, but companies/advertisers could pay Facebook to have the bots shovel opinions and products to users in a more overwhelming and coordinated approach than is currently possible with external bots.
You cannot really pollute these platforms any more than they already are imo. The AI slop perfectly resonates with the rest of the garbage there, so it shouldn't make a difference.
Took me a second to realise the title's refering to "AI slop", my inital reaction was something like "I know, it's always been slop".
Thank fuck I deleted my Facebook when I did (around the time of the Cambrige Analytica scandal). Never had an Instagram.
For anyone reading, delete them all. Load of shite, you won't miss them.
This type of stuff will get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
how are advertisers ok with this?
Does it make them money?
If yes, then they’re ok with pretty much anything.
Does it make them money? Or is this a bubble?
No idea. If they want to waste their money on it it’s not my problem. I don’t participate in any social media that uses them.
I already saw dishonest advertisers making fake ai profiles to promote their shit
On the short term it works.
On the long term, who's going to check Facebook if it's all ads and slop?
You say that, but then why do things like Tumblr and Reddit keep trying to ban the sex to appease advertisers?
That’s apples and oranges. They don’t want users with fetishes and gore. They can’t control those narratives. Some bot that they can control? That’s fine.
How does it make them money?
If an AI mentions their product, either by chance or deliberately, it can drive engagement and sales. These AI aren’t here just to be generic personalities or space fillers, they’re here to drive engagement and make money.
They're the ones buying it.
Good question. I imagine it's too niche to make much difference right now, but I can see this eventually being a reprise of the display ad industry shooting itself in the foot by doing nothing about click fraud.
Why wouldn't they be? IG gets billions of eyeballs every month to put their camouflage ads in front of. They don't care about much else.
The best part is no one is going to leave the platform over this except a small minority of nerds like us. The average person is addicted to social media. Ain't nothing going to drive them away.
Not even all of us. If I left the platform, I would lose all contact with a significant proportion of my not very large family, who are spread across the globe. I don't really have another good option if I want to be able to keep in touch with all of them. Incidentally, that includes my own brother.
I do make sure to curate my experience with every meagre tool they give me to do so, however. That's the best I can do.
Heard that. I hear people complaining about being forced to use WhatsApp to keep in touch with "boomer relatives." Man I wish WhatsApp was the worse tool I was compelled to keep an account on.
Right. I have relatives in multiple parts of both the U.S. and the U.K. along with Australia and New Zealand. I wish I had another way to keep in touch with them, but I just don't.
Edit: forgot the ones in Canada and Granada.
Damnn are you folks trying to infiltrate every Commonwealth country or what? Impressive spread you got there.
A lot of the family got the fuck out of Europe after WWII because we're Jews. But being Jews, we decided to get as far away from each other as possible too.
Haha I'm not familiar with that stereotype, but that's understandable. My family is full of more of the out-of-sight out-of-mind types.
Apologies on my "infiltrate" joke. I meant it in like an anti establishment way rather than an antisemitic way!
I didn't think of it that way, no worries.
Its crazy to me that everyone uses that garbage and they’re so surprised when you tell them that you don’t. It’s like you’re doing something wrong.
A fine fellow I met at an open day at a university asked me for my LINKEDIN. I told him that I didn't use it, and then he asked me for my Instagram. Somehow, my Dad was almost as astounded as him that I had neither. You can probably guess which social media I only really use nowadays.
Knowing my luck this would be the only way to make the metaverse suddenly take off and rake in billions.
Accelerating dead internet.
Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it's worst effects.
I'm sure your stocks will be fine.
Stocks for what? AI? I can't have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I'd rather die than support a single penny to since they abuse the technology (and technology in general). But they are not the only ones using the technology. I'm not really a fan of stocks to begin with, profit focused companies are a plague in my opinion.
Finally someone said it
The idea of random AI floating about to soothe people and give them attention is damn creepy. Ew.
have you seen the 2013 movie Her?
Those apps are legitimately dead. They just haven’t caught up yet.
You've heard of the Dead Internet Theory, now get ready for the UNDEAD Internet Theory!
Pretty good article, this stood out for me:
All I can think of is one of Mr. Lovenstein’s comics… we’re finally free now!
I’m so fucking glad I never made a facebook account. Even years ago I saw it as an unnecessary annoyance; I can’t believe how bad it’s gotten since.
A friend tried to get me to sign up in the early boom days. "It's like MySpace, but for adults!" Yeah, that's not the selling point you seem to think it is.
I love your downvote. “Nuh uh! Facepals is cool! You take that back!” lol
I used to really enjoy Facebook. It was a great way to keep up with old friends and made new ones. For me it was a springboard for IRL relationships when I moved to a new city. But now it's just so riddled with advertisements and I've learned a lot about their extremely shady data collection practices that I just use it to "post and ghost" for my business.
"The never-born"
Wow you got one to spell correctly! God. We’re fucked.
Hey Liv! Sup! Jow menee ees and uus in jujubes?
After it replied with a non answer, here we go:
As you can see, this is still a great way to out an AI.
Great.
Na weeg unna haf tamayka brannu dielek jussa fak widda sinthoz
Now we’re gonna have to make a brand new dialect just to fuck with the synths
w3 c@n @1w@y5 60 b@ck 2 1337
Bots probably already know that though because of what they've been trained on. Actually ... Let's see Gemini do it for us.
Not too bad.
The inverse is more impressive to me.
But it can be defeated by trying slightly harder. Multiple characters, inconsistencies, adding slang and loanwords, the same tricks we've always used to get around censors and oversight.
Of course we'd have to keep it out of their training data and constantly change it... cyberpunk future is exhausting already.
I can instantly read that, and I’m proud to have been alive during 1337 speak. Thank you, friend, for the awesome memories
1337 43V@
God damn that is fucking hard to read.
Someone’s never taken a linguistics 101 course 😜
I have not. But english is also not my native language so my brain reads that gibberish in a different way.
totally fair! 🤷♂️
Maybe we should interact with these heavily. Then Facebook can be abandoned.
The Slopification of everything. Welcome to 2025.
Obviously this is all stupid and you'll find problems anywhere you choose to look.
The problem I'm finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don't know how much of the "engagement" your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can't use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.
Personally I'm rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don't really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh... seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.
I don't think people are getting that they are going to sell this as a service to corporations. Kind of like selling positive feedback on Amazon if Amazon did or does that. They're not trying to boost numbers, but sell people saying what the company wants them to say. This can be anything from politics to buying a certain product.
That's the thing about the Age of Information - it's also the Age of Misinformation. The invention of television was hailed as a landmark in worldwide education and bringing people together. Instead it became almost entirely whatever people were willing to sit through ads for to feed their growing addiction to entertainment. The Internet enabled anyone to broadcast whatever quality of content they feel like spewing out. It's really not even intelligent to expect random content to be true without doing any cross-checking, but few people do. Most just happily consume any material they already agree with, like Patrick sucking up SpongeBob's grandma's cookies.
I don't need anymore fake content. Real people are doing an amazing job of that already.
Meta got it wrong. People want AI that generates brain rots and sad cat stories, not this dumb thing! /s but not really
This is great. If it keeps up my remaining family on FB will give up and I can finally delete my stagnant account.
How would you even tell AI slop from the normal, human-generated slop on Facebook anyway?
It has a common meter.
Couldn't care less. I don't use FB or Instagram.
Among us?
I avoid any multiplayer game that has bots that you can't filter out and you have to play with them not knowing that they're bots. it removes all the font of any game ever
But dead men do tell tales
Of how we've run out of luck
And we're all fucked
Because society is weak and frail
Changes nothing. I think I'll start following known AI's and pick my favorites. FFS I still log into pokemon go to pick up a pokemon every now and then.